Guide To Advanced Audience Targeting For Remarketing

Remarketing continues to be the jewel in the crown for online marketers seeking to go the extra mile to hold that spark of interest shown by visitors to a website. People no longer leave your website forever; a targeted remarketing campaign allows you to re-pitch to those visitors who showed a clear interest in your products or services but did not buy.

Retargeting is used mainly by online merchants by inserting a snippet of code on the website pages to track users who have bounced off the site, and enticing them back using powerful media ads.

Remarketing stats tell their own story

According to statistics released by Digital Information World, retargeting is a formidable tool in the online marketers armoury:

49% of online marketing companies have a specific budget for remarketing

Before remarketing, business managers would routinely watch and weep in the face of fall-offs in funnels and bounce statistics, but this is far from the endgame these days. The ‘one that got away’ is a segment of your target market so hot it should be burning your fingers, not having you tear up your Google reports. In fact, it should be at the centre of your campaigns and goals, and worth a healthy chunk of your marketing budget.

As seen from the above stats, most marketers and business mangers employ basic remarketing techniques. The problem is they do not see the kind of results they envisaged.

We are taking those unique techniques to the next stage here – see our original article: 9 remarketing tactics to grow your business – to show how you can streamline your remarketing campaign even further for impressive lead generation and sales results.

Let’s divide those crucial factors into 6 main areas:

Users

Pages

Devices

Partners

Process

Budget

Users

It is easy to think of all those figures in your bounce area as one amorphous blob: they are all leavers. Hit them with one fat advert! But all you are doing is chasing your tail if you do not know why each user failed to convert. To get a better idea as to why they bounced, look at which page they were on before leaving; which product they were interested in; even the time they spent on each page.

Statistics show that visitors who spend longer on the site before making a sale are likely to be buying more expensive products. Pages they viewed will tell you what their specific interests are and ads can be created in line with the product or line of products they have shown an interest in.

Pages

Too often, not enough thought is given to which pages should be tagged. A scatter-gun approach is employed with all pages being tagged to catch everyone. These methods fail to pick up on the nuances of each page, not to mention the individual needs of each visitor.

Let’s say for instance, you have an ecommerce website and you wish to increase sales of your most popular products. In Google Analytics, you will find your highest performing landing pages for those products. By tagging specific pages over a set period of time (say 30 days) with a focus goal in place (to increase sales by 25%), you can not only create bespoke ads for the segment of your bounced target market you are aiming at, but you can also analyse performance after the campaign has ended.

Devices

Not only must you be aware of the variety of users within the segment and the pages being tagged, but you must also take into account the variety of devices your visitors use to view your adverts. Because mobile and tablet screens can distort, require scrolling or make reading difficult, you’ll need to make your ads responsive to the devices they will be seen on. To achieve this, use a variety of ad sizes.

Partners

Contextual marketing takes cookie technology to a new level. It allows you to see where your visitor has come from. How could this be useful in enhancing brand awareness and lead generation, you ask? The point is, by working with companies within your industry – not those providing the exact same products or services but complementary or related ones, such as you manufacturing golf balls and your partner company manufacturing golf clubs – you can both pick up interested non-buyers on both your sites.

When your partner organisation receives visitors to their site, the html code and cookies work together to trigger ads to your site as well. This could also work in reverse with you offering your partner the same benefits from your site, benefiting all concerned.

Process

Once you have all the factors in place, success depends on a streamlined and nifty process. Now that you are aware of your visitors in greater detail, you can segment your marketing campaign to reflect groups of bounced visitor needs, and your partner’s requirements. This could be individual groupings of pages they visited, time spent on the site or special-interest pages. For visitors who bounced early, it may be useful to create ads that further educate them about your company and products.

The individual you are pitching to is clearly interested in your product but to entice them back, you’ll need to up your game. This could be through a discount, a coupon or a special offer related to the product they have shown an interest in. Different ads will be used for individual segments of your campaign and remember, sometimes all that’s called for is a unique and focused call to action.

Budget

If you’re savvy, you will have a budget set aside for remarketing. Also, you need to be looking at each individual group demographic and applying sub-budgets to each one. Some bounced visitors will be hotter than others and will therefore need a bigger chunk of your resources. For instance, it makes sense to bid more on shopping cart abandons than home page or informational page bounces.

But don’t let your chasing turn people off. After a time, they will get weary of seeing the same old ads coming up again and again – shooting yourself in the foot as far as brand awareness goes. Throughout your campaigns, keep an eye on how the ads are being picked up and if results are negative, change the ad message. You may also need to cap the number of times your ad is seen a day to avoid over-spending to get a conversion.

RATE THIS ARTICLE:

RICHARD TALBOT Head of Paid Search

An experienced digital marketer with 8+ years of industry experience, Richard has worked in client account management at both Google AdWords and Microsoft's Bing Ads in Dublin. He now leads the Paid Search & Display Advertising team at Tinderpoint delivering successful campaigns for a portfolio of diverse national and international clients across many industries.